Wednesday, October 22, 2008

Introduction to ThreeHundredEight.com

From October 2008 to March 2017, ThreeHundredEight.com provided projections for Canadian federal and provincial elections, focusing primarily on the topic of political opinion polls.

The site was owned and run by me, Éric Grenier, a writer specializing in Canadian politics and history.

He is now a senior writer with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

He wrote for The Globe and Mail from 2010 to 2014, The Hill Times from 2010 to 2015, and The Huffington Post Canada from 2011 to 2014. He also worked with Le Devoir during the 2011 federal election campaign and L'actualité during the 2012 and 2014 Quebec election campaigns, and has been published in several history magazines.

He has been working for the CBC since 2014.

ThreeHundredEight refers to the number of seats that were in the Canadian House of Commons when the site was launched. This site was inspired by the fantastic work of Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight, an American data site that does electoral projections for congressional and presidential races, poll analysis, and more. My methods were inspired by but do not mimic his methods.

Details on the methodology of the poll aggregation and seat projections are available here and here. Methodology for the forecasting model used during election campaigns is available here.

Projections on this site are subject to the margins of error of the opinion polls included in the model, as well as the unpredictable nature of politics at the riding level. The degree of uncertainty in the projections is also reflected by the projections' high and low ranges, when noted.

ThreeHundredEight.com is a non-partisan site and is committed to reporting on polls responsibly.